4.0 Death Knight DPS - *bangs head into wall*

I'm reposting this from my personal blog back on Oct. 13th, right after patch 4.0 went live.  This sort of dissatisfaction played a pretty big part in me abandoning Chill of the Grave for a while.  I've gotten over a lot of it, not because I figured out some magic combination to make everything wonderful but because I just came to terms with it.  I'll have more technical posts on the changes in the near future, as well as on Blizzard's upcoming changes and my dabblings in Unholy, but for now, here's some ranting.

I'm not ready to give up on Dariahn yet, but I'm not getting along with the changes to Frost DPS.  The old rotation had a rhythm to it that clicked perfectly with me on, at risk of sounding really dippy, a deep, visceral level.  Icy Touch, Plague Strike, Obliterate, Pestilence, Blood Strike, Frost Strike while the runes refresh, Obliterate, Obliterate, Obliterate, Frost Strike while the runes refresh, Obliterate, Obliterate, Pestilence, Blood Strike, Frost Strike while the runes refresh, throw in a Howling Blast when Rime procs to keep me from zoning out too much...  The mathematical grace of the old rotation was dead-on perfect.  I felt a deep sense of satisfaction when I managed to get through, say, Koralon without having to reapply my diseases because everything clicked at just the right moment.  Nothing went to waste.  Yes, fights like Putricide that were nothing but waste were frustrating, but not every class can be good at every fight.

It was certainly no reason to make waste the default.

What, praytell, is the point of Festering Strike?  [Okay, I know now the point is to spam it in Unholy, but still.]  The cost of refreshing diseases - refreshing them for a whole 8 seconds out of their now-30-second duration - has gone from 1 Blood rune to 1 Blood rune, 1 Frost rune, and 1 now-useless Unholy rune.  Likewise, what was the point to reducing the cost of Howling Blast to 1 Frost rune?  If there was also an attack that used a single Unholy rune it would be forgivable.  In a Frost rotation, Blood Strike existed to use up those Blood runes that you weren't spending on anything else so they were not sitting there wasted.  It also turned them into nice useful Death runes.  Nothing serves that function for the Unholy rune left behind by Festering Strike or Howling Blast.  It sits there on my pretty little DKI Runes UI, a testament to the wastefulness of the new DK playstyle.  It mocks me.  I hate it.

I was also bothered by how often I found myself standing there for several seconds auto-attacking the training dummy because I was out of resources.  Yes, there were times in my old rotation when I might be out of resources for possibly two whole seconds if Rime didn't proc, but this was noticeably worse.  Despite what one might see in the occasional PuG or from that DK who is clearly only in the raid because they know people, Death Knights aren't supposed to just stand there auto-attacking.  This just isn't acceptable.

Maybe I'm wrong.  I'm willing to work on it, to concede that this is just growing pains from having to l2p all over again, to hope that once I get a proper new rotation hammered out everything will smooth out and I'll look back on this post with amusement.  Right now, though, I feel like my favorite class has lost its groove.